It is all obvious or trivial except…

Facepalm

Of course we should not make fun of the afflicted. That is reserved for those who are stupid and or malevolent like Spud, not those who are truly afflicted. But…

Less than 6% of people with learning disabilities who are known to social services are in employment, but many more can work, and want to do so.

Right….

The biggest barriers we face are negative attitudes and the idea that learning disabled people are not capable of work, or that it will be too time-consuming to employ them, or it will cost the company a lot of money.

So reduce one of those barriers maybe?

Below the line we get some marvelous Graudianista:

No one should be paid less due to any form of physical and or mental health disability or illness

Rent/ mortgage,food,transport etc etc etc is the same price for everyone or have I missed something?

There are numerous stories of marginally employable learning disabled folk who gained the social and “feeling needed” benefits of simple marginal work but had to go once the minimum wage gang brought them the benefit of being priced out by socialist “compassion”.

The cognitive disabilities of Guardian commentators are well displayed on this article. You can see why they are keen to elevate people with mental disabilities. The suggestion that employers be forced to employ them is particularly good

@Mr Ecks:
Those folk include my neighbor Tom. He can’t add minimum wage value and the scheme that used to subsidize 50% of his pay was ended. It would be illegal to give him a job at less than the minimum wage so he’s now allowed only to do voluntary work.

I used to live near housing for adults with limited abilities. These folk drifted to the High St daily to window shop, make a small purchase and drift back. In a more humane age they would be the teamakers, the moppers, the fetchers and carriers, have a sense of purpose, be part of the real community. “Care in the community” and minimum wage legislation has shoved them to the periphery.

“Less than 6% of people with learning disabilities who are known to social services are in employment,Less than 6% of people with learning disabilities who are known to social services are in employment. . . ”

This really doesn’t say anything.

1. What percentage of the total are those ‘known to social services’?

2. Might the low percentage quoted be because those not known to social services are doing just fine for themselves and so haven’t felt the need to suck on the state’s teat?

IOW, those ‘known’ are known because they are exceptionally disabled (or just lazy)?

My thoughts on reading this was that the author didn’t seem particularly disabled- I mean, he’s not noticeably adrift from the mean established by other Guardian journos.

This raises the question- at what point does the expanding definition of disability plus the diminishing employability cause by MW legislation cause the most harm? And following on from that, how many of those likely to be affected in future must come from middle class families before the law is changed?

I left a comment on the article myself, and received one reply from someone who quite clearly missed the point I was trying to make. I reproduce both here:

LeftWhinge

Given that the author of this piece has held the same job for 16 years, has a wife, three children and has presumably managed to write this piece unassisted, I would question the nature and severity of his learning disability. He is remarkably reticent on this matter, given the forthright nature of the article. This excerpt from a piece he wrote in the Independent suggests that it is not immediately apparent:
“Dealing with the teachers at my children’s schools can be a bit of an obstacle too. I have told them I have a learning disability, but they don’t understand what that means – it would be better if they took more time to understand.”

And he undoubtedly does, for a start because he (moron) will have been working since he was a teenager, whereas the PhD is in his/her late 20s, and has a mountain of debt. Plus, if it is a PhD in the totally useless subject of Women’s Studies then your PhD will remain forever unemployable in anything else other than a continuation of the drivel.

@JuliaM: Perhaps you could join me and some friends of mine in the “Ruin Guardian Game”. The object is the Alinskyite one of making them follow their own rules, specifically “community standards”.

Comment frequently, but sharply, logically and with no foul language.

Eventually they will stop publishing you at all, even if you comment “This is an excellent article”.

I have gone through that in thee identities now, and I keep a record of all my rejected comments, and all the comments to mine urging me to die, someone to kill me or using extremely vile language at me, which are never moderated.

I’ll be in the UK in July on other business, but can anyone refer me to a good litigation law firm? My friends and I are going to blow maybe ten thousand on legal fees, see if we can’t make them squeal or bring their whole vile house down.

Does anyone think crowd funding would work – would anyone here throw a few pennies at it? We’ll apparently also need a locally resident plaintiff. Any ideas?

You can almost certainly get it diagnosed as depression: “I’m finding it increasingly difficult to get out of bed in the mornings”. Your GP will probably prescribe you happy pills, but you don’t have to take ’em.

I’d have no trouble employing someone with a physical or learning disability. Except if they have something directly opposite one of mine as we cannot be in the same place without risk. A H&S issue that cannot be resolved if employing them in the same building.

The thing about employing someone is that they have to be productive enough or enhance the productivity of others enough to be worth employing.
Someone that can pack faster than I can – great. Someone who can pack slower than I can, not so great. And I’m a slow packer.
Its not personal, its business.

For those seeking to form an opinion on the nature and scope of the author’s disability, there is an interview with him on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf7oG9_Z9Og
He has certainly been well-versed in the talk: “my biggest achievement was accessing employment”.

Feature, not bug, to price the disabled out of employment.
Read Sydney Webb’s paper advocating it in The Journal of Political Economy- pricing the “defectives” out of the labour market was the whole idea; “it tends constantly to the selection of the fittest”;
or even more clearly:
“I pass to a more interesting point. What would be the result of a Legal Minimum Wage on the employer’s persistent desire use boy labor, girl labor, married women’s labor, the labor of men, of the feeble-minded, of the decrepit and broken-down invalids and all the other alternatives to the engagement of competent adult workers at a full Standard Rate ? What would be the effect, in short, upon the present employment, at wages far below a decent level, of workers who at present cannot (or at any rate do not) obtain a full subsistence wage? To put it shortly, all such labor is parasitic on other classes of community, and is at present employed in this way only because it is parasitic.”

Similarly, the blessed Marie Stopes wanted to promote contraception and abortion to stop the “defectives” breeding. Now the Guardianistas find that their heroes’ ideas are working and they don’t like it!

No one should be paid less due to any form of physical and or mental health disability or illness

That really annoys me. No one should get paid because they are a Special Snowflake. Yes, we all have bills. But we also all add value to society in various ways. If we want to get paid we need to add value to our work places.

I would like to see more people ask themselves what value they are adding and how much it is really worth. I don’t think this crosses the minds of many of the young.

No one should be paid less due to any form of physical and or mental health disability or illness

Yes, they shouldn’t be paid less for doing an identical job. What the snowflakes appear to want, though, is to force employers to pay more than the work is worth just because of who the worker happens to be, and building a strawman of people wanting to pay less than the work is worth, just because of who the worker happens to be.

Whatever happened to the Left’s rallying cry: an equal day’s pay for an equal day’s work? If you can build me a wall that doesn’t fall down, I’ll pay you to build a wall that doesn’t fall down, I don’t care if you drool while thinking and can’t wipe your arse without assistance.

There are numerous stories of marginally employable learning disabled folk who gained the social and “feeling needed” benefits of simple marginal work but had to go once the minimum wage gang brought them the benefit of being priced out by socialist “compassion”.

My sister is one of these; she had a job in a supermarket, wasn’t paid much but it wasn’t about money (her earnings were pretty much offset by a reduction in benefits). However she got something far more important than money out of it; she had the feeling that she was part of society and, more importantly, a useful part of society.

Then the cunts (and sorry, but there is no other word that can apply to them) decided that she was being taken advantage of and forced her out of the job market. So now she costs the taxpayer more money in benefits and spends her time moping around Bath going to community groups with other disabled friends (costing the taxpayer money). She lives an almost apartheid-esque life, totally separate from the rest of society; forgotten and ignored. And the cunts have moved on to ruin other peoples’ lives instead.